


No Worthier Games

by lonelywalker



Category: The Art of Fielding - Chad Harbach
Genre: Age Difference, Blow Jobs, Canon Character of Color, Canon Gay Relationship, First Time, Fishing, Interracial Relationship, M/M, Older Man/Younger Man, Outdoor Sex, Porn Battle, slight AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-26
Updated: 2013-01-26
Packaged: 2017-11-27 00:08:26
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,605
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/655887
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lonelywalker/pseuds/lonelywalker
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Owen and Guert attempt to go fishing without killing any fish. (Or any worms, of course.)</p><p>Title from <i>Walden</i>. Spoilers for the whole book.</p>
            </blockquote>





	No Worthier Games

The Audi was waiting for him out past the sports fields, the engine running, peals of operatic music audible even before Owen opened the passenger-side door and ducked inside. Guert seemed almost surprised to see him, despite the fact it was his e-mail that had arranged this covert assignation in the first place.

“Fishing,” Owen said, by way of greeting, as he pulled on his seatbelt.

Guert smiled slightly. “Indeed.”

“I’m sure you’re aware I’m a vegetarian and utterly deplore cruelty to animals of any kind, including fish and whatever you were planning to use as bait?”

“Very aware.”

Owen settled into his seat and let out a sigh of resignation. “Well then. We’d better get going.”

It was mid-June, about two weeks into the summer term at Westish College, which meant that the days of idyllic sunshine by the lake were only intermittently disturbed by the presence of the student body. Despite being hired to teach playwriting to the summer students, Owen had found most of his days to be perturbingly empty. He had no more baseball commitments and no more exams. The environmental, drama, and yoga clubs he usually attended were inactive over the summer months, and all of his friends bar Mike Schwartz had headed home till September. In the last two weeks he’d found himself largely alone in his room, reading Nabokov and reworking his latest play. Even though he usually spent all his time wishing for a little peace and quiet, the e-mail that had finally landed in his inbox had been a very welcome distraction:

_Dear O,_  
 _Excellent fishing this time of year. Care to join me on Saturday?  
Yours, Guert_

He’d sat and stared at it for a few minutes. _Fishing_. Strictly speaking, even what the e-mail suggested outright was a tad unethical – the college code forbade staff and students from palling around – but no one would seriously care too much. After all, it was the summer and Owen was technically staff too, if only for the time being. It was more what the e-mail didn’t say, or rather what the circumstances had been the last time they’d discussed this morally deplorable hobby.

Owen’s head had been splitting apart and he’d narrowly avoided passing out for the evening on Guert’s couch while his mother and Pella discussed the impressive size of Mike’s biceps, not to mention other body parts. Owen had trailed into the kitchen in his socks and pajamas and found Guert there, absolutely dismayed at the idea of Owen leaving for Tokyo in a few months. Guert had mentioned the possibility of going fishing together over the summer, and Owen, seeing that for precisely what it was, had kissed him.

Then Genevieve had called out, asking what on earth they were doing in there in the dark, and that had been the end of that. Owen had spent the next two months wrapped up in classes and baseball, and Guert had no doubt been busy too, running the college and repairing his relationship with his daughter. But, despite the head injury, despite the pain meds and the champagne, Owen had been completely certain that, in those few brief seconds they’d had together, Guert had kissed him back with all the love and tenderness in the world.

So Owen had shrugged to himself and replied to the e-mail that yes, of course he’d like to and that Guert was incredibly sweet to think of him. And here they were, speeding northward with the great expanse of Lake Michigan stretching out to their right.

He looked back over at Guert. “How far are we going?”

“Not far. Just… to somewhere quiet.”

Normally Guert was every inch the college president in his beautifully-tailored Italian suits, his silver-streaked hair neatly trimmed, his smile wide and his small talk perfect for all the parents and potential donors who stopped by. Probably no one ever thought of him as _old_ , he was always far too cheerful and vibrant and, yes, good-looking for that. But very few students ever saw him as anything like a friend, an equal, or a real flesh-and-blood human being.

The lack of the suit was certainly helping today: instead, Guert was wearing jeans and a brownish shirt that seemed a little frayed around the edges. Owen laid a hand on his knee. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you out of a suit before.”

Guert glanced down. “No? Well, I just got into the habit, I suppose. I’m always representing the college.”

“Hm. Well, I like it.” Owen gave Guert’s knee a squeeze and let his hand drift higher up Guert’s thigh. “Is this okay?”

There was a moment’s pause. “Yeah,” Guert said, although his voice was oddly hoarse. “It’s okay.”

Twenty minutes later by the Audi’s clock, which meant sitting through another couple of arias about death, doom, and destruction, they pulled off down a dirt track and past some signs that ominously warned about private land and prosecutions. Guert parked in the shade of a copse of trees by the lake, switched off the engine, and got out of the car.

“Should I be worrying about minefields?” Owen asked, joining him.

“What? Oh, no. Don’t worry. This place has been tied up in lawsuits over property rights for years. I came here last weekend to check it out… Thought you’d appreciate somewhere free of both tourists and students.”

Guert opened up the trunk and Owen looked in, curious. “You actually brought fishing rods?”

“Of course.”

Owen considered this development. He’d assumed that “fishing” was all an elaborate ruse to get him alone – after all, who would seriously invite a vegetarian and animal rights activist on a fishing trip? – but Guert handed him the two rods to carry, and they certainly seemed real enough.

“How’s Henry doing?” Guert asked as they walked to the shore. He was carrying what Owen thought was probably a tackle box, with a plaid blanket draped over his shoulder. 

“All right. He’s staying with his parents for the summer, back in South Dakota. He sounds a bit more like Henry every time I talk to him. How’s Pella?”

Guert smiled and beckoned Owen to walk a little way along the shore with him, to where there was enough of a clearing in front of the trees for them to lay out the blanket. “She’s incredibly bored – this isn’t quite San Francisco – but she’s enjoying the college. Chef Spirodocus has really taken her under his wing. Today she and Mike are in Milwaukee, I think. Going to the movies.”

“Sounds nice.” Owen sat down on the blanket and fiddled with the rod. “I haven’t had a date in years.”

Guert sat beside him. “I find that hard to believe.”

“Really? There are only so many gay men on campus, Guert, and only so many of those are single. How many of them do you suppose are men I’d like to be with who are also interested in me?”

“I can’t imagine anyone not being interested in you.” Guert took the rod from his hands. “Here, I’ll show you.”

“I find it harder to believe you’re not dating anyone.” He’d seen Guert – President Affenlight – with a woman once, a couple of years ago when he first started at Westish. They’d been walking by the town bookstore, holding hands, laughing and talking. But for whatever reason that had apparently lasted about as well as his own relationship with Jason Gomes.

Guert was, legitimately, the type of man people stared at in awe when he walked into a room. Owen’s own mother had been smitten with him within a couple of minutes. Owen himself had spent quite a few nights thinking about Guert Affenlight and also about _why_ he was thinking about Guert Affenlight: probably it was the cheekbones that did it. Stupidly attractive bone structure coupled with lovely dark eyes and thick hair and broad shoulders, and an absolutely self-effacing manner. Possibly the fact that Guert was a complete genius in his field didn’t hurt either.

And now Owen found himself just as riveted by Guert’s long, pristine fingers working on setting up the line as Guert himself seemed to be.

“I meant to talk to you,” Guert said finally, “about what happened in the kitchen. But everything got so busy and… I almost convinced myself you didn’t even remember.” He squinted up into the sun. “But of course you do.”

“Did you want me to remember?”

Guert turned his attention back to the line. “My brother Frank taught me how to fish one summer. Sort of. He was eight years older than me, into girls and smoking and trying to be cool even though we lived in the middle of nowhere outside Madison. My dad told him to make himself useful and teach me… I think I spent more time actually in the river than fishing it. Frank wanted to be anywhere else in the world but with his kid brother.”

He passed the rod back to Owen and breathed in one long breath. “The thing is, what I want… I want _you_ more than I’ve wanted anything in my entire life. But the question of what exactly it is that I want from you… I don’t know. You’re so brilliant, such a talented man, that I just… Well, sex seems like a pretty pitiful excuse for the way I feel.” 

Owen set the rod down carefully and, for only the third time that he remembered, broke through the invisible barriers of the college presidency and stroked Guert’s hair. “Do you think it would help if I kissed you?”

Guert turned slightly, a glimmer of a smile on his lips. “I think it’s about time I made a move, don’t you?”

Their kiss in Guert’s kitchen had been sweet and tentative and brief, with Owen’s head pounding and Guert unsure, and both of their relatives in the next room. It had been maybe Owen’s fourth first kiss, his fourth time making a move on someone or having someone make a move on him. Even if Guert had never been kissed by a man at all, he still had forty years of first kisses on his side. 

Now Guert kissed him full and hard on the mouth, a hand cupping Owen’s once-damaged jaw, and drew back only slightly as if to ask “is this okay?” before Owen laced fingers through his hair and pulled him back in. He could certainly imagine legions of women left breathless if Guert made a habit of kissing like this. He wouldn’t have to imagine himself that way at all soon: not just because Guert was pressing into him, lips and tongue and all that smoky apple taste, but because the man doing all of this, the man kissing him and holding him and getting him hard, was _Guert Affenlight_ , his literary idol, his school’s president, and the best-looking man in the whole of Wisconsin.

“Oh god…” Owen murmured, too low probably for even Guert to hear him, as Guert dipped his head and kissed Owen’s throat with aching tenderness. “Wait, wait…”

The anxiety he saw in Guert’s eyes, coupled with his now-mussed hair, was a strange savior as Owen pulled his t-shirt up and off. He didn’t have to be the inexperienced kid here, not at all. 

“Nice moves,” he said to Guert, kissing him gently, guiding Guert’s fingertips to his chest. The summer sunlight felt nice twinned with the breeze off the lake, but more than anything he simply wanted to be touched. 

“I do try.”

He unfastened the buttons of Guert’s shirt a little haltingly, continually distracted by how good Guert’s mouth felt on his and then, once Guert got the hint from how it made Owen’s breath catch every time, Guert stroking and rolling his nipples between deft fingers. 

“I’m not exactly in great shape,” Guert said hesitantly when Owen loosed the last button, his fingers brushing against the now very obvious bulge along Guert’s inseam. 

Owen raised his eyebrows. “Did you think I was modeling nude in my spare time?” Even if he had spent hours every week practicing with the baseball team, it had hardly contributed much in the way of muscular development. 

“Sort of my point.”

Poor Guert looked so uncomfortable, and for reasons other than making out with a male student in public, that Owen had to smile and kiss him again. “I think you’re gorgeous. And if you had any idea what you’re doing to me now, you’d be happy you hadn’t spent more time in the gym, because I’d have come in my pants already.”

A thankful smile was really all the permission he needed to push Guert’s shirt back off his shoulders and see more than any student had probably ever seen of the college president, at least since the last time Guert went swimming at the VAC. Which was to say that Guert’s reddish-brown coloring really did seem to be natural, never mind how pale Pella was by comparison, and that Guert’s conception of “out of shape” was a lot better than most sixty-year-olds Owen could name. And he had a black-ink tattoo of a sperm whale on his left arm. 

Owen tilted his head and looked at it. “Isn’t that…”

“The same as Pella’s. Yes.”

He had to smile at Guert’s weary tone of paternal forbearance. “You can tell me all about it later.” He lay back on the blanket, kicking off his sneakers into the grass, and stretched out a hand. “Come here.”

Whether Guert’s plans for the day had ever even gone as far as kissing, he had no idea, but Guert settled down beside him eagerly enough, and there was no shocked recoil when Owen jerked down the sweatpants from his hips and nudged Guert’s hand onto his erection. Guert certainly _looked_ , though, watching with a kind of dazed fascination as he stroked Owen’s penis, felt the tightness of his balls. Owen used the moment to pull open Guert’s belt, rubbing a hand down over the intriguing outline in those jeans. 

Guert gasped out a breath against Owen’s lips, like he’d just been punched in the solar plexus, and rolled over onto his back, letting Owen wrestle down the too-tight jeans and the briefs and the boots, and two pairs of socks. Undressing was far too difficult, and it was summer. In the winter they might’ve just given up halfway through. Never mind, in the winter they wouldn’t even have ventured outdoors.

Owen carefully lay back down beside Guert, who honestly seemed much more relaxed now that he was naked. It was done: all the admissions made, every inch of skin revealed. And no matter what they did now, they were already screwed if someone saw them, so they might as well do everything.

“Rise free from care before the dawn, and seek adventures,” Guert said, quoting _Walden_ with a professorial tone and a boyish grin. “Let the noon find thee by other lakes, and the night overtake thee everywhere at home.”

Owen smiled and kissed him gently before moving down, sucking at a nipple until Guert groaned in need, and then nuzzling Guert’s penis, shyly kissing the tip, investigating it with his fingers as if this were a scientific study rather than a more artistic, creative sort of exploration. 

“O…” Guert said, watching him, and Owen licked up a thin trail of pre-come before closing his mouth around him.

He half wished he’d brought lubricant with him – it wasn’t that he didn’t enjoy this, but Guert had probably had hundreds if not thousands of blow jobs in his life, probably from many more experienced partners, and could easily lie back and close his eyes and pretend his mouth belonged to anyone else in the whole world. Except that Guert, if he wanted, could actually _be_ with, if not anyone else in the world, then a good number of them, and instead he was here, a hand stroking Owen’s close-cropped hair as he watched Owen take his cock.

“Yeah, just like that,” Guert murmured, and of course Owen thought of all those speeches of Guert’s he’d sat through, including a few on YouTube he hadn’t heard in person, and how perfect a wordsmith Guert was, and how eloquent and insightful, but also how good it felt to have Guert rocking his hips, pushing into his mouth a little faster and a little harder, begging for more attention from Owen’s tongue. “Oh fuck yeah, Owen. Jesus.”

Owen scratched lightly along Guert’s thighs as he sucked a little harder, and stroked a hand down under his ass – not to poke any unwelcome fingers anywhere, not yet, but just to feel a little more skin, a little more of that animal heat, as Thoreau might say.

He couldn’t see Guert well from this angle, it was more about all those panting breaths and the way Guert’s stomach was tense under his touch, but he knew Guert looked absolutely beautiful being gently undone like this. Not so much the elegant president in his suit, but a man who wasn’t really too far away from the unworldly farmboy he’d been at Owen’s age.

“Owen,” Guert said, for once with absolute clarity. “You’re gonna make me come.”

Owen grinned around Guert’s cock and refused to let up. Not only did Guert last a lot longer than any of his previous lays, but he was a lot more of a gentleman about it too. If you could call bucking up hard and fucking Owen’s mouth for the last few strokes gentlemanly, but then Guert really was coming, his back arched as he cried out Owen’s name and Owen swallowed him down, taking it all in.

“Jesus Christ.” Guert’s eyes were squeezed shut when Owen finally raised his head and kissed his way up Guert’s belly. “You literally had me seeing stars, sweetheart.”

“Are you okay?” Owen dropped down to Guert’s side as Guert scooped an arm around him, his free hand going to Owen’s cruelly-neglected penis.

“Better than okay.” Guert kissed him, his hand feeling more than good as Owen’s body relaxed. “Can I…? I mean, I’ve never tried before.”

There were precious few guides in transcendental literature for this situation. “Guert, are you really asking my permission to blow me?”

Guert gave half a shrug and tugged on Owen’s cock, making him moan. “I’ll try not to bite anything.”

Inexperienced and tentative though Guert was, Owen could barely imagine anything better to do on a June afternoon than lie nude in the sunshine by a magnificent lake and have a beautiful, more-than-willing man suck his cock. If there were in fact anything better, it would involve lots of lubricant and foreplay to get Guert comfortable enough that Owen could push his thighs apart and fuck him deeply for as long as his body would let him. But there were a lot of Saturday afternoons in a summer. Not to mention Saturday mornings and Saturday evenings and Saturday nights. 

“You’re going away,” Guert said afterward, when they lay tangled up in a sleepy, post-coital embrace. “Soon.”

“At the end of August.” It seemed like years in the future, he had so many classes to prepare for and teach between now and then.

Guert, though, squinted out toward the lake like a child trying not to cry. “I wasted so much time. So many weeks.”

Owen smiled and tightened his arms around Guert’s warm body. “It was worth the wait.”

“Mm.” Guert settled his head against Owen’s shoulder. “But you’re still going away.”

“I’ll be back next summer.” Graduation, reuniting with Henry and Mike, maybe doing some more teaching if Dr. Sobel asked.

“Mm,” Guert said again. 

It wasn’t hard at all to tell what he would be thinking: of the nine months Owen would be in Tokyo, and then the forever following next summer, during which Owen would be pursuing a graduate degree probably on the east coast somewhere, or interning in Chicago or New York, or holed up at his mother’s place working on a play. There was no reason at all for any Westish undergrad to stick around unless he, like Mike, somehow got a job here. But, unlike Mike, Owen was no favorite of the athletic department, and he truly doubted that the deans would want to replace kindly old Mrs. McCallister with a young activist black man.

Still, in the modern world of the internet and intercontinental flights, it seemed unnecessary for either of them to let a little thing like geography get in the way of excellent sex. Or, at least, sex and whatever intense feeling welled up inside him whenever it came to Guert.

Owen stroked his hair and kissed him on the forehead. “Pella’s staying in Milwaukee tonight?”

“I believe that’s the plan.”

“Well…” Owen checked his watch. “Unless you were planning to actually catch some fish, I suggest we find some little touristy place to have dinner and then check into a quaint rural motel so I can make love to you without worrying about snakes nipping at my feet.”

“There are only two types of poisonous snake in Wisconsin,” Guert started to say, but thankfully broke off before detailing both types and quite how long Owen would have in each case before his limbs became necrotic. “That just might be an idea. And… maybe we could find a drugstore too. I strongly doubt the motels around here come stocked with lubricant for personal use.”

“I strongly doubt there are any drugstores at all.” Owen looked at Guert levelly. “You really want to?”

Guert smiled. “I don’t want to waste any more time.”


End file.
